UN Rapporteur on torture: “Julian Assange is a political prisoner.” | Hacker News Reader

UN Rapporteur on torture: “Julian Assange is a political prisoner.”

exberliner.com

154 pointsdotcoma49 comments

Some readers may be interested in Craig Murray's coverage of the extradition "hearing" [0]. The hearing, to be decided by a judge, has apparently been set up to conclude that Julian Assange is to be extradited to the US.

The UK and the US appear to be willing to discard years of diplomatic sophistries – such as the "rule of law" – for this to happen. This should be troubling to citizens of those countries, because they are openly adopting the tools of the despot.

It's notable that despite being "open court," access to the Assange hearing appears to have been deliberately restricted, despite being paritally online [1]. Notably, generally-respected international NGOs like Amnesty International[2] and Reporters without Borders [3] have raised concern about this. From Craig Murray's coverage, it looks like restricting access was precisely because this hearing was prejudiced.

[0] https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/09/your-man-in-...

[1] https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/09/your-man-in-...

[2] https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/eur45/3076/2020/en/

[3] https://rsf.org/en/news/usuk-julian-assanges-extradition-hea...

It's despicable how they make him crawl into a perspex box for this, how they're torturing him and keeping him away from anyone.

The US is trying to lock Assange away for 175 years for publishing documents that exposed American actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and revealed the often sordid workings of American diplomacy. Assange is clearly a political prisoner.

The shameful thing is how little protest there's been from the established news media. Most people are unaware this trial is even occurring, and if they are, most liberal Americans think Assange somehow deserves it for having published DNC and Podesta emails that put Clinton in a negative light.

You answered your own question there.

> The shameful thing is how little protest there's been from the established news media.

> having published DNC and Podesta emails that put Clinton in a negative light.

The media establishment doesn’t like it when you make them look bad. Surprise, surprise, they don’t care about Assange.

And then there's the dropped rape case that should have no relevance to this but likely manages to confuse the narrative around Assange.

They also tried to spread the rumor that he is a pedophile.

Correct, and more to that, why would the press care? Did Assange expect anything else from the way he acted?

You keep burning bridges you'll end up alone in an Island. Seems like Julian is having a case of LeopardsAteMyFace

Manning and Assange do deserve protection from whistleblowing. Then Assange decided to take sides and kept digging a hole for himself.

You antagonize every western country and then wonder why they treat you like an enemy. Assange suddenly screams "Wait, you still have to follow the rules!"

Those rules are in place to protect people like Assange from prosecution. We need whistleblowers to protect from abuse. USA tries to be a world police, but in reality it can't even handle internal policing. American way, lock everyone up and no tolerance.

Assange isn't a whistleblower, he just tries to stir the pot of shit as best as he can. He has well documented anti-american sentiments and publishes his leaks without redacts to cause maximum loss of life and safety to Americans and American allies.

WikiLeaks didn't leak documents without redacting them. They collaborated with multiple newspapers around the world to publish them in the most sensible way possible.

The First Amendment is supposed to protect people with "anti-American" sentiments. After all, you don't need a Constitutional amendment to protect people the government likes. The whole point is to protect people the government wants to shut up.

> to cause maximum loss of life and safety to Americans and American allies.

Assange hoped that he could end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq by revealing the true nature of those wars. He thought he was saving lives.

Assange didn't antagonise every western country, he antagonised powerful people in those countries.

I think it's important for our own sanity to recognise that our government and it's intelligence agencies are not us, even though sometimes with will be aligned.

They should care about the precedent. This is really about freedom of the press.

A guy that’s universally disliked is the perfect subject for sliding the authoritarian ratchet.

Have you watched the news in the last four years? Precedent doesn’t matter anymore. All that matters is that your side wins.

What could someone leak that would justify locking them up, according to you?

Anything that puts human lifes at risk.

That's why Assange and his team worked in close collaboration with a number of news organizations (for example the Guardian) and reached out to the US government in order to remove all information from the leak that could put someone at risk. The unredacted version of the leaked documents were released by cryptome, and not by wikileaks.

Assange didn't leak anything. He published documents that Manning, an insider, leaked to him.

The First Amendment gives broad protection to publishers. If the government wants to stop a publication, it has to demonstrate that the publication would create a highly specific, concrete and irreparable harm. This is the result of New York Times v. United States (1971).

Justice Hugo Black's concurring opinion goes after the nebulous "security" justification for limiting freedom of the press:

> The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.

> [...]

> The word 'security' is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment. The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United_S...

> 17 out of the 18 charges that Julian Assange has been indicted for are for espionage. Espionage is the quintessential, textbook example of a political offence

Could someone explain this to me? It seems to me ridiculous to claim espionage is a textbook example of a political offence.

Espionage is often used like that. It's the charge North Korea, China and Iran use to imprison European or US-tourists and journalists.

Espionage is a crime against the state. Just like treason or terrorism, the very definition of the crime and its interpretation is by the entity that claims to have been wronged.

Crimes against the state are widely abused by despots for silencing political dissidents.

> political crime or political offence is an offence involving overt acts or omissions, which prejudice the interests of the state, its government, or the political system

> States will define as political crimes any behaviour perceived as a threat, real or imagined, to the state's survival, including both violent and non-violent oppositional crimes. A consequence of such criminalisation may be that a range of human rights, civil rights, and freedoms are curtailed, and conduct which would not normally be considered criminal per se (in other words, that is not antisocial according to those who engage in it) is criminalised at the convenience of the group holding power.

> At one extreme, crimes such as treason, sedition, and terrorism are political because they represent a direct challenge to the government in power. Espionage is usually considered a political crime. But offenders do not have to aim to overthrow the government or to depose its leaders to be acting in a way perceived as "political". A state may perceive it threatening if individuals advocate change to the established order, or argue the need for reform of long-established policies, or engage in acts signifying some degree of disloyalty, e.g. by burning the nation's flag in public.

> Because a political offender may be fighting against a tyrannical government, treaties have usually specified that a person cannot be extradited for a political offense.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_crime

Q: If someone robs a bank to get money to fund terrorism then does that crime become a political offence, and should that person be immune from extradition?

Q: If someone attacks a politician is that crime political and not extraditable? Does it matter which politician?

My point is that it’s a horrible slippery slope and political partisanship is unavoidable. Colonel Alexander Vindman blew the whistle both lawfully and in a morally correct way - Assange didn’t.

Q: If the New York Times publishes leaked classified information should the editor of the New York Times be charged with espionage?

> Q: If someone robs a bank to get money to fund terrorism then does that crime become a political offence, and should that person be immune from extradition?

Robbing a bank is a crime against the bank. You can be extradited for that. There may be an additional political charge.

> Q: If someone attacks a politician is that crime political and not extraditable? Does it matter which politician?

That is a crime against the person. You can be extradited for that. There may also be a political charge.

We are talking here about extradition for purely political crimes – because they can be and are often completely made up. You may be interested in checking some of your assumptions about the nature of the case and revisiting your opinion. I did, and I found that a lot of what I "knew" about this case was wrong.

Specifically, from RSF (Reporters without Borders):

> Crucially, the prosecution - for the US government - failed to produce any evidence of actual physical harm caused to anyone as the result of Wikileaks’ publication of leaked documents, severely undermining their claim that Assange knowingly put sources at risk. Testimony from Khaled El-Masri argued that to the contrary, the information published by Wikileaks exposed the atrocities to which he was subjected and has served as important evidence in his pursuit of justice. [0]

From the same article:

> Journalist John Goetz testified that Wikileaks had republished the unredacted diplomatic cables, which had been published in the first instance by website Cryptome and a number of media outlets. None of these outlets have faced adverse legal consequences for publishing the documents - only Wikileaks. A statement read into the record by Cryptome founder John Young confirmed that the unredacted files remain on the website to this day, and that Cryptome has never been approached by US law enforcement suggesting their publication was illegal.

Then we have the deliberate stifling of access to the hearing:

> However, at the start of proceedings on 7 September, RSF received a further communication from the court, stating: “The judge has regretfully decided not to grant requests for members of the public to attend the Julian Assange hearing via CVP...she is concerned about her ability to maintain the integrity of the court if members of the public are able to attend the hearing remotely.” On 8 September, Vincent nonetheless attempted to access the CVP via the link that had been provided, and was admitted to the waiting room before being removed and unable to log in again. Amnesty International and other NGOs also reported having their access revoked, along with a number of political observers.

[0] https://rsf.org/en/news/usuk-julian-assanges-extradition-hea...

Are you saying that Julian Assange robbed a bank?

Extradition treaties generally have an exemption for "political offenses," which in this context has historically meant crimes against the state, such as espionage, treason, sedition and rebellion. Even acts that would normally be criminal can be exempt from extradition if they were carried out as part of a larger political crime (like rebellion). These sorts of exemptions date all the way back to the mid-1800s, and are standard, in my limited understanding.

The US-UK extradition treaty goes even further and states that extradition will not be granted when the charges are politically motivated:

> extradition shall not be granted if the competent authority of the Requested State determines that the request was politically motivated

I don't think anyone can deny with a straight face that the prosecution of Assange is politically motivated.

1. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/extradition-treat...

The irony of the whole situation is that in trying to prosecute Assange, the US government has lost more public trust from its own actions than it did because of Wikileaks.

Nobody trusts the government today. The whole thing is absolutely Kafkaesque and ridiculous.

This might be true is some echo chamber, but it doesn't seem like almost anybody cares. Is there some kind of survey that says otherwise? Unless you are a huge fan of Assange prior to all this I cannot think of anybody (person, media, or otherwise) that is even following this.

They do care but for now they pretend not to care because they don't think that they can do anything about it. But the pressure is building up. It's going to be released eventually. All at once, violently and in the most unexpected way as history has shown time and time again.

No pressure is buildilng because no one cares. Other than an extreme fringe of the chattering class subset of the digerati, nobody cares about the fate of Julian Assange. As soon as he ran to the embassy he was guilty in the eyes of the mass public and became nothing more than a sideshow for two column inches on page 6 of the Sunday paper. Your vague references to some coming revolution are probably the most laughable part of all of this.

>> Your vague references to some coming revolution are probably the most laughable part of all of this.

There is so much cognitive dissonance in our society that the levels of mental illness are going through the roof. It's 100% certain that there will be a revolution in the next decade.

There may be other reasons why people are not following this:

> Due to Covid distancing measures, the court made five spaces available to members of the public, in a gallery with a total of 36 seats. Communications from the court repeatedly stated that these would be allocated on a first come, first serve basis - however this was not respected in practice. For nearly three weeks of proceedings, three seats were held back for unspecified “VIPs” for the first hour and a half each morning, and the first half an hour each afternoon, meaning that often only two members of the public (including NGO observers) were present in the courtroom. After RSF learned that the VIPs were in fact diplomats who were unaware these seats were being held for them, diplomatic intervention with the court finally resulted in all five seats being made fully available to the public from 24 September.

One of the few organisations that might have sought to report on this – the Guardian – published the book which allegedly first released the encryption key to the underacted diplomatic cables.

[0] https://rsf.org/en/news/usuk-julian-assanges-extradition-hea...

American culture is very strong in its distrust of governments and authorities of any kind, and always has been. That was one of the first things I noticed while living there.

But the Assange case won't move the needle at all. Of the few people who actually know of the case, almost none will learn what actually happened because they won't look deep enough to see past the many, many red herrings. To the vast majority, he'll just be an egotistical journalist-wannabe rapist with no regard for the safety of others, and not someone to be missed or cared about. Truth doesn't matter when it comes to writing history, or protecting the powerful.

This is from September 9th

You break the law, you go to prison. Simple. If you don’t like the law, you vote to change it or run for office. You don’t get to sneak up behind it with a knife then cry wolf and subsequently demand protection.

I'm glad that he told the world the truth about what our governments do. It's called journalism.

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